Читать книгу The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy - Daniel Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn - Страница 5

IN ONE SENSE, it was an unexceptional life—or, at least, no more exceptional or distinguished than the lives of certain other great poets, in whom the richness of the work stands in striking contrast to the relative uneventfulness of the life. (Emily Dickinson, say.) Constantine Petrou Cavafy—the Anglicized spelling of the Greek Kavafis was one that Cavafy and his family invariably used—was born in Alexandria in 1863, the youngest of seven surviving sons of parents whose families were not at all untypical of the far-flung Greek diaspora, with its hints of vanished empire. Their roots could be traced not only to the Phanar, the Greek community clustered around the Patriarchate in Constantinople, and to Nichori (Turkish Yeniköy) in the Upper Bosporus, but also to Caesarea, Antioch, and to Jassy, in present-day Moldavia. His father, Peter John Cavafy, was a partner in a flourishing family business devoted to corn and cotton export that eventually had offices in London and Liverpool as well as in several cities in Egypt; after moving from Constantinople to London, he finally settled in Alexandria, which was ruled at the time by the Muslim Khedive but had a large population of Europeans. There he would be considered one of the most important merchants in the mid-1850s—not coincidentally, a time when the Crimean War resulted in a steep rise in the price of grain. The poet’s mother, Haricleia Photiades, the daughter of a diamond merchant from Constantinople, counted an archbishop of Caesarea and a Prince of Samos among her relations. At the height of their wealth and social success in Alexandrian society, the parents of the future poet had, in addition to their other servants, an Italian coachman and an Egyptian groom. Said Pasha, the Egyptian viceroy, paid attentions to Haricleia that were, if we are to judge from the photographs of her, purely a matter of politeness; Peter John received a decoration from the Khedive at the opening of the Suez Canal.

What effect the memory of such glory and prestige—carefully tended and endlessly polished by his mother long after she’d become a widow living in not very genteel poverty—might have had on her impressionable and imaginative youngest son, we can only guess at; but it is surely no accident that so much of Cavafy’s poetry is torn between deep sentiment about the lost riches of the past and the intelligent child’s rueful, sharp-eyed appreciation for the dangers of glib nostalgia. For his father’s premature death, when Constantine was only seven, would bring hard times to Haricleia and her seven sons, from which the family fortunes would never really recover: Peter John had lived well but not wisely. For several years the widow Cavafy and her three younger sons ambled back and forth between Paris and London and Liverpool, relying on the generosity of her husband’s brothers. They stayed in England for five years, where Cavafy acquired the slight British inflection that, we are told, accented his Greek. When it became clear that the surviving brothers had hopelessly bungled their own affairs, Haricleia returned to Alexandria in 1877, when Cavafy was fourteen. With the exception of a three-year sojourn in Constantinople, from 1882 to 1885, following the British bombardment of Alexandria (a response to Egyptian nationalist violence against some of the city’s European inhabitants; the bombardment largely destroyed the family home), Cavafy would never live anywhere else again.

For some time, the life he lived there was, as he later described it to his friend Timos Malanos, a “double life.” The poet had probably had his first homosexual affair around the age of twenty, with a cousin, during his family’s stay in Constantinople; there is no question that he continued to act on the desires that were awakened at that time once he returned to Alexandria. By day, when he was in his middle and late twenties, he was his corpulent mother’s dutiful son (he called her, in English, “the Fat One”), working gratis as a clerk at the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works in the hopes of obtaining a salaried position there. (This he eventually did, in 1892, remaining at the office with the famously Dantesque name—the “Third Circle of Irrigation”—until his retirement, thirty years later.) From seven-thirty to ten in the evening he was expected to dine with the exigent and neurotic Haricleia. Afterward, he would escape to the city’s louche quarters. One friend recalled that he kept a room in a brothel on the Rue Mosquée Attarine; another, that he would return from his exploits and write, in large letters on a piece of paper, “I swear I won’t do it again.” Like many bourgeois homosexual men of his era and culture (and indeed later ones) he seems to have enjoyed the favors, and company, of lower-class youths: another acquaintance would recall Cavafy telling him that he’d once worked briefly as a dishwasher in a restaurant in order to save the job of one such friend, who’d been taken ill. About the youths and men he slept with we know little. We do know, from an extraordinary series of secret notes that he kept about his habitual masturbation, that the amusing Alexandrian nickname for that activity—“39,” because it was thought to be thirty-nine times more exhausting than any other sexual activity—was not entirely unjustified:

And yet I see clearly the harm and confusion that my actions produce upon my organism. I must, inflexibly, impose a limit on myself till 1 April, otherwise I shan’t be able to travel. I shall fall ill and how am I to cross the sea, and if I’m ill!, how am I to enjoy my journey? Last January I managed to control myself. My health got right at once, I had no more throbbing. 6 March 1897.

At about the same time he’d settled in his rather dreary job, he began to write and publish seriously. (He had been writing verse, in English and French as well as in Greek, since at least the age of fourteen; and the family’s flight to Constantinople in 1882 inspired a journal that the nineteen-year-old Cavafy, already in love with literature, called Constantinopoliad: An Epic, which he soon abandoned.) Apart from that, the life he led, as he got older, wasn’t noticeably different from that of many a midlevel provincial functionary. He enjoyed gambling, in moderation; he played the stock market, not without success. Apart from his constant and extensive reading of ancient and modern historians in a variety of languages, his tastes in literature were hardly remarkable. His library of about three hundred volumes contained a quantity of what his younger Alexandrian friend, the botanist J. A. Sareyannis, later recalled, with a palpable shudder, as “unmentionable novels by unknown and forgotten writers.” An exception was Proust, the second volume of whose Le Côté de Guermantes he borrowed from a friend not long after its publication. “The grandmother’s death!” he exclaimed to Sareyannis. “What a masterpiece! Proust is a great writer! A very great writer!” (Interestingly, he was less enthusiastic about the opening of Sodome et Gomorrhe, which he dismissed as “pre-war.”) He particularly enjoyed detective novels. Simenon was a favorite in his last years.

At the turn of the century, when he was in his early forties, he took a few trips to Athens, a city that was largely indifferent to him—as he, an Alexandrian, a devotee of the Hellenistic, the Late Antique peripheries, had always been indifferent to it, the great symbol of High Classicism. He likely fell in love there with a young littérateur called Alexander Mavroudis; but about this, like so much of his erotic life, we will never have more than the odd hint. A few years later—by now his mother had been dead for almost a decade—he came to live at the overstuffed apartment on Rue Lepsius (today the Cavafy Museum), where he would spend the rest of his life. For Sareyannis, who wrote a reminiscence of his friend for an Athens journal in 1944, it is only too clear that the poet’s taste in decor was clearly no better than his taste in fiction:

Cavafy’s flat was on an upper floor of a rather lower-class, unkempt apartment house. Upon entering, one saw a wide hall laden with furniture. No walls were to be seen anywhere, as they were covered with paintings and, most of all, with shelves or Arabian étagères holding countless vases—small ones, large ones, even enormous ones. Various doors were strung along that hall; the last one opened onto the salon where the poet received his visitors. At one time I greatly admired that salon, but one morning in 1929, as I was passing by to pick up some collections of Cavafy’s poetry to be delivered to friends of his in Paris, I waited alone there for quite a while and was able to study it detachedly. With surprise I realized for the first time that it was crowded with the most incongruous things: faded velvet armchairs, old Bokhara and Indian stuffs at the windows and on the sofa, a black desk with gilt ornament, folding chairs like those found in colonial bungalows, shelves on the walls and tables with countless little columns and mother-of-pearl, a koré from Tanagra, tasteless turn-of-the-century vases, every kind of Oriental rug, Chinese vases, paintings, and so on and so on. I could single out nothing as exceptional and really beautiful; the way everything was amassed reminded me of a secondhand furniture store. Could that hodgepodge have been in the taste of the times? I had read similar descriptions of the homes of Anatole France and of Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who were also, both of them, lovers of beauty and gave careful attention to their writing. Whether Cavafy himself chose and collected those assorted objects or whether he inherited them, I do not know; what is certain is that Cavafy’s hand, his design, could not be felt in any of that. I imagine that he just came slowly to love them, with time, as they were gradually covered with dust and memories, as they became no longer just objects, but ambiance. (tr. Diana Haas)

The cluttered, déclassé surroundings, the absence of aesthetic distinction, the startlingly conventional, to say nothing of middlebrow, taste: Cavafy’s apartment, like his job, gave little outward sign of the presence of a great artistic mind—the place from which the poetry really came. The more you know about the life, the more Seferis’s pronouncement that Cavafy existed only in his poetry seems just.

Most evenings, as he grew older, found him at home, either alone with a book or surrounded by a crowd of people that was, in every way, Alexandrian: a mixture of Greeks, Jews, Syrians, visiting Belgians; established writers such as the novelist and children’s book author Penelope Delta, Nikos Kazantzakis, a critic or two, younger friends and aspiring writers. (Among the latter, eventually, was Alexander Sengopoulos, known as Aleko, who was very possibly the illegitimate son of one of Cavafy’s brothers—acquaintances remarked on a striking family resemblance—and would eventually be his heir.) To these friends and admirers the poet liked to hold forth, in a voice of unusual charm and authority and in the mesmerizing if idiosyncratic manner memorably described by E. M. Forster, who met Cavafy during World War I, when Forster was working for the Red Cross in Alexandria. It was Forster who would do more than anyone to bring Cavafy to the attention of the English-speaking world, and it is to him that we owe the by-now canonical description of the poet as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” Cavafy, the novelist recalled,

may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. … It deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1096, or with olives, their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia Minor. It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet.

It was, in other words, a life that was a bit of a hybrid: the fervent, unseen artistic activity, the increasingly tame pleasures of a middling bourgeois existence, the tawdry quartier, the abstruse, rather baroque conversation. Not coincidentally, the latter pair of adjectives well describes a particular literary manner—characteristic of the Hellenistic authors who flocked to the era’s cultural capital, and who were so beloved of Cavafy—known as “Alexandrian.”

In 1932, Cavafy, a lifelong smoker, was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. That summer he traveled to Athens for the tracheotomy that would deprive him forever of the famous voice; from that point on, he was forced to communicate in a distorted whisper and, later on, by means of penciled notes. He returned home in the autumn, after declining an invitation from his wealthy friend Antony Benakis, a collector and the brother of Penelope Delta, to stay with him in Athens. (“Mohammed Aly Square is my aunt. Rue Cherif Pasha is my first cousin, and the Rue de Ramleh my second. How can I leave them?”) After first refusing and then allowing himself to be visited by the Patriarch of the city, he died in the Greek Hospital in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday: an elegant concentricity, a perfect closure, that are nicely suggested by what is said to have been his last act. For we are told that on one of the pieces of paper that had become his sole mode of communication he drew a circle; and then placed a small dot in the middle of that circle. Whatever he may have meant by that glyph, certain people will recognize in it an apt symbol. It is the conventional notation, used by authors when correcting printer’s proofs, for the insertion of a period, a full stop.